


The Catharsis Suite

by archea2



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Catharsis, Friendship, Healing, Love, Multi, Past Abuse, The Losers Club (IT) Love Each Other, but everyone finds peace, not resurrecting anyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22629010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: "There'll be peace when you are done."
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough & Georgie Denbrough, Don Hagarty/Adrian Mellon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Mike Hanlon & Leroy Hanlon, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, The Losers Club & The Losers Club (IT)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	The Catharsis Suite

**Author's Note:**

> This was the fic I needed to write right after watching Chapter 2, though it took a while. All my thanks to the kind nonnies who cheered it on - you know who you are.
> 
> Mention of past abuse (Bev, Adrian), nothing graphic.

  
  


_Peace, my heart, let the time_

_for the parting be sweet._

_Let it not be a death but completeness._

_Let love melt into memory_

_and pain into songs._

_Let the flight through the sky end_

_in the folding of the wings_

_over the nest._

_Rabindranath Tagore, “The Gardener”_

  
  
  


There’s just. There’s just that itch to let him keep it all, she says.

All?

Clothes. House. That fucking enlarged pic we had in our stairwell, she says, and is glad he doesn't ask for details. They bought the pic, Tom did, as a "classic". Now she thinks of the man on the photograph, towering above the seated girl, his hands spidered over her shoulders, and shakes her head so hard it sends a whiplash jolt of pain.

Ben's gaze listens on, his hands still idle.

I want to start from scratch, she says, and, fuck, speak of the devil. Her mouth aches for the dry touch of a smoke. He'd let her have one, she knows, he wants her to have it all, their every shot hers to call. But she's done with ghost comforts. Instead, she says again "from scratch", lifts her chin, peels back her sleeve. The boat lulls as she does, cradling her, the water a segue from yesterday’s kiss - benign, lustral, enveloping them unseen. Bev can do this.

He takes her offered arm and bends his head. 

The kiss is mostly warmth and air, so gentle it makes her eyes water in turn. He offers a trail of touches that meander between this hurt and that, only raising his head once, sharply, when he comes to the puckered circle bestowed by one Tom's Sobranie Golds. Dark suffuses brown, but then he angles his head to the side so she will not be witness to a man’s anger, and Bev marvels at her _slowing_ heart. 

It’s okay, she murmurs. It is, it will be, now he’s placing his lips, their seal, over Tom's crest. Bev's heart is on the up-wave, slow and sure and so, so utterly safe.

My mouth, she says next. Tom struck her there, in a past well on the way to a fade-out. 

Ah, he says under her breath, and does it. He doesn't kiss her as Bill might have done, whic, good. Bill loved the beautiful girl in her, and she can acknowledge that, send a jab of gratitude his way for letting her know that she could stand, a summer girl, and kiss a boy’s grief better. But Ben loved the winter in her too, the _wabi-sabi_ of her. Bill had parents who used to love him, a doting brother that was, and it was only human, all too human, that he'd reach out through her to that lost land of I-love-you. But Ben. Ben had embraced her slurs and all, back when she'd been as wobbly and brittle as the paper tower on his model. 

Ben, who bore a phantom H on his midriff, now kissing her mouth.

She rubs her cheek to his, strong and loving, the wetness shared between them, and slips her hand under his shirt, and thinks of a new H-word for him and her.

  
  


* * *

Dear Georgie, 

Ben and Bev took me sailing today. 

You don't know them, but you’d love them. Not just because you loved us Losers for better or worse (don’t let me bring up Richie and the Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Clambake Ice Cream Record) but for the them of they. Ben you’d like, because he is the very model of a model captain. And Bev, well, Bev is a lovely person. Their boat is lovely too, though she hasn’t got a name yet. Bev says it might end up the _S. S. Some Bird_ to honour Stan. So I had to tell them of how he told you about the blackbirds, when you were three, and for weeks on you couldn’t shut up about the _batbirds_. It was one of those rare, white stone days when I had the pleasure and privilege of watching Stanley Uris, Loser extraordinaire, lose it. Buddy, I was so proud of you. 

We sailed all day. And today was all sun - not a smudge of cloud - with the light curling up in every dip of wave, and the gulls up and down, joining invisible dots in the sky. 

I”m writing to you and yet I feel you here, with me. The boat, Georgie, she is so fast and I’m crying a bit, but then I hear your stern little voice saying "Too much salt, Billy" and I’m laughing. The water and my tears kind of slip into one another, and, Georgie, it feels like the best ending. Finally.

I'm signing my name now, before I fold this up and entrust it to the waves. There’s half a yellow sun balanced on them. I'm trusting them to find the other half. 

With love,

Billy

* * *

He wrote her a letter, too, and sometimes - times when there’s not a bone in her that doesn’t go mean, go nagging and clawing at him for putting himself off _her_ board - she wonders if he wrote it first or last. A chore to dispatch, before he got to the heart of the matter, or the last word made hers, the last will, the true and loving testament of Stanley Uris. 

She has no idea. The enveloppe with her name on it rode the crest of the pile, so what? He laid his wedding ring on top of his folded clothes. So neatly tucked in. _You could bounce a quarter off our marital bed_ , she’d tossed at him, laughing, forty-eight days into their marriage, and he’d known the laugh for what it was, unbridled joy, his own a softhearted innuendo. He had rarely laughed, her Stan, but he had been a smiler.

She has read and recited his letter so many times, folding, unfolding it, a relic taken every-which-way she goes for terror of losing it. By now it feels like her eyes have polished his words until there is no grip left for meaning. 

You have to forgive him, Donald Uris says. He quotes Maimonides on the cruelty of withholding healing, while she stares at him across the abyss of the coffee table.

But then he glances down and bends to retrieve something from the floor: a tiny flat item shaped like an oak leaf. It has the tip of a wing on it. 

What’s this?

Oh… he was doing this puzzle, birds, you know how he loved birds, that night. When. I gave it away, the puzzle, only there was a missing piece. I just, I didn’t think of. I. More tea?

She got rid of it because she could not bear the thought of the symbolic crust gathering around that one empty spot. Now she is Alice: the key is found, but the door was taken away. Out goes her hand. She watches him ransack his mind for a word that will fit in, as he places the piece on her palm, only to find none. 

That night she takes a leaf of Stan's office paper - he always brought it home in stacks - and cuts out a tiny window, very neatly, at the center of the page. A thin rectangle, barely enough to host a word of two, not unlike those slips of paper handed out by fortuneteller machines at a fair. So tell me, she dares the letter laid out on the glass table, its creases more smoothed flat again by the heel of her hand. She pictures the rabbi's frown at her clumsy shibboleth, and the backlash rises in her. 

First, she covers Stan’s letter with her carved-out page. Then, she slides the blank sheet this way and that, so that his words may resurface through the gap. _Again_ comes first, and _for you_ . She pauses, but no, Stan, no, love, you don’t get away so easily. Up, down: _Will_ , the head of that writer’s name, then _call_ , followed by _morning_ . Strange, how each marooned word lights up from the inside, a live wire. When the window settles on _and me_ , Patty’s fingers slow of their own accord.

It’s child’s play, really - or pay-off, for helping him piece together so many puzzles.

That night she dreams of a wood at break of dawn. They’re huddled in the high grass of a clearing, he and she, the friendly long stems rustling against their bare arms. “Look,” Stan tells her as the wood fills with a sound of wings. “Turtledoves.”

* * *

_Il voyagea_ : Adrian’s motto as a man of letters. 

Never one for flannel and Davy Crockett hats, his feisty, faithful Adrian, nor a fan of Thoreau (“though I do like wood!”). But he’d driven Don half cuckoo, pontificating on the way these two little words had changed the face of naturalism. The man Flaubert had coined them while trying to impress upon his readers the mood of a dude after he’s lost the love of his life. _He journeyed_. And you’re not told where, or how long, because it’s the blank right after that speaks the loss, Don, tagging him no matter how far or foreign he goes. Less is more. Loss is mere. Fucking Flaubert, man.

(Himself a free-ranging electron before Don. He’d confessed to it and subsequently of his wish to change - settle down - make an honest hometown of Don’s native slough. Had taken it into his clever addled brain to prove himself not a bolter, and, God, if only Don had been less besotted or half as mulish… 

Nothing to do but fucking voyage now.)

June finds him in Florida, the coastal antipode to Maine. It’s still the Atlantic, but so is Portland where they buried Adrian, and some part of Don just can’t face the prospect of going inland. So he rises with the day, shuns Orland, turns in before the sun can round its transition to a red balloon. Finds hikes in the dryer parts of the land, where no sound but his ricochets off the white-sanded paths until the day is done with and the rum beckons. The honkytonk round his hotel corner has family booths and a nook or two for the single guests, and he’s humped in one of them, nursing his third shot, when a hand makes contact.

Don Hagarty?

Don startles himself by acquiescing. The man’s voice has a burr to it, blurrily familiar - ditto the brown face, lanked and etched into adulthood, leaning into the pool of tangerine light. It’s late enough that an early drink is acceptable, still too early for any reddening of the sky. 

The man’s smile blossoms in the light. And - there’s a reason why Don shuns the gator farms, or the shark aquariums, but there’s a... softness to the man’s teeth. It’s the farthest thing to a leer when he pats the calloused tabletop an inch from Don’s left hand, saying, Mind if I rest my legs? It’s a tall order, breaking away from Derry. But rewarding.

 _Derry_. He says it like any two-bit word, yet with every understanding crammed under that clean-spoken voice. A firm lucidity that has Don whip his head up and tighten his gaze on the speaker. 

Mike, the man says instantly. Mike Hanlon. Adrian was one of my patrons.

Suddenly Don is mobbed by Adrian’s voice, warm, excited, telling him _A good man’s hard to find but Derry can boast of two, baby_ , and his eyes widen.

The librarian?

The ex-librarian.

God, but Adrian loved that place. Don always suspected that one reason why he whacked that last chapter on the nose every time it peeped up hopefully was so he could go back there and spend another hour or five within its silent walls. And Mike let him. Closed an eye when the clock hands strained past 6 and Adrian kept scribbling; talked with Adrian of books, maps, hymnals, primers, the old Isaiah Thomas prints that Adrian said were enough to give a body faith in humanity.

He talked to me, Mike is saying. He was a kind soul. It was devastating when I found out…

...his voice petering off, still warm, but deep, but grave, and Don wouldn’t have it otherwise. The sun has low-angled itself to where it laps at their hands, a pinker light, and Don is torn: stay where he can be heard, but where he has to see. 

He motions for another round of drinks.

To Adrian.

To Adrian.

The rum coats his throat thickly, ushers in his low _My lover_. Again, and again, louder, but the honkytonk is lost to its own voices, one birthday in full pelt, men and women shrilling their hope for the boy’s long life. Mike leans further across the table.

Writers, he says. His smile is firm, his eyes dance to their own light. Some make it very easy to love them.

Writers, Don echoes. Another shot. The iron circle around his heart is giving, is relenting, each new breath eased by the toast. 

Got no idea which of them scripted this, Mike says. You know - these odds. Us crossing paths. But one thing I know for sure. He’d want me to tell you.

...What? Don asks, and Mike’s next words usher a language of two, a transparent curtain that blocks and at the same time enhances the human noise around. 

We _squelched_ that clown to death.

The circle shrinks, opens - the liberated blood harpooning his heart, warm and vibrant. Don leans in turn, leans frankly, until his elbows are lined up with Mike’s. 

Tell me, he says, and Mike begins.

* * *

As far as Ben can recall, he has always loved lines. 

As far as he _now_ recalls, the first one was a vertical, invisibly perfect, a slash across the brilliant air of the Barrens when she plummeted feet first into the lake. It met the horizontal line under her name, and the two lines were stamped in Ben’s heart, never to go. He’s a bit ashamed, he has since confessed to Bev, that he credited them to the Bauhaus all those years. No, really (when she starts laughing).

He took her lines to heart. Even when she herself was pared down to a name (to be looked up, a vow made and betrayed in his stakhanovist days), the line endured. Ben - painfully, humbly, doggedly - burnt away each plump curve, molding himself on his secret core; later, when planning his house - a Pritzker laureate, a CEO at thirty, his mother’s pride and joy (maybe?) - he carved a gym corner in the basement. It took time, it took a toll on his lungs and deltoids worth a king’s ransom, but even as the beautiful lines fused over his head, joined in translucent beauty, they built him from the inside. 

(It takes a golden ball for a frog to be kissed.

A golden ratio for a house to stand tall.

Ben thought of that golden vertical line, eternally touched by sun and summer, and perspired with a will.)

He did it at night, and he still does when he can. That is, he waits until the thin snurfle that proclaims her good sleep to let himself gently loose; kisses her freckled arm; rises, and takes his naked feet padding across the redwood floor. Often the _clip-clip-clip_ of Homie’s claws will pad along. The moon envelops the lovely MarshGrass curtains with their pattern of silver and blue Himalayan poppies. The MarshGrass hammock, her anniversary gift. The warmhearted mess of His and Hers design drafts, trailing their shameless affair between one room and the next 

(That one yours? The, er, Doric hula hoop?

That’s a harp-back chair, you heathen!).

Ben gave his linear hermitage over to her when she turned her hand to design. Washing it of Rogan&Marsh first, so she could weave a name for herself and later stitch it back to her first calling. And she did herself proud. 

(Ben too. Goes without saying.)

But…

He walks up to the basement door. The moon cups the door knob in its light, a vivid copper, and Ben stretches his hand out. But the touch is when all the lights in the room go up, gold in, copper out.

Beverly is rubbing her eyes, still in his pajama vest. (He kept the legs.) Their duvet trails behind her, draped on the floor like a cathedral train.

...Ben? 

She sounds more puzzled than worried, thank god; she’s made such giant steps. Still, he quickly retraces his steps, mentally checking on the heater. No, the air is warm. Still, he lets his arm hover at her waist. 

I’m sorry, I woke you up, I’m sorry, I’ll make less noise. 

Oh, she says, her voice husked from her sleep, and then clearer, oh dear heart. Dear burning heart. Talk to me.

Ben’s shoulders sag, the exhaustion seeping in. Long day’s night, long week’s day, and they’re entertaining twice this week. It’s great that they do. He loves it. Really. Loves that, together, they’re turning his eagle’s nest into a messy, mellow, convivial nest. But it’s a steak dinner on Tuesday. Truffle buffet on Sunday. It’s hard, Ben has found to his cost, to juggle messy and lively with nouvelle cuisine. At some point between defeating a Moloch clown and finding happiness, he’s got addicted to the truffles.

He blurts this out, and that he loves her, won’t let her down, ever, and he can find time to stay in shape. He can! Only he’s saying it kind of horizontally, spread out on the duvet with her head on his stomach and Homie grounding their feet. Somehow, she’s dragged him to the couch. When he should really be…

Hey, she says, her voice tickling his navel. In the words of Richie Tozier, you know I don’t give a flying fuck about the abs, do you?

But…

This, she says, and puts her mouth to what ought to be a dip, under his ribs, but is a place that’s gone a little soft, a little happy through the year. This I crave and cherish. Wanna know why?

He strokes her hair, listening to the Nebraska wind. Heater’s going good. Homie a plus, who took to her the moment he heard Ben speak her name. Keep her warm, Ben told him. Keep her safe.

It’s called a dad bod, she says, and gives it an impish kiss.

The words knocks Ben awake. He struggles up, until he is propped on an unsteady elbow. She’s grinning. God. He’d lie if he said that the thought, hope, had never in the past twelve months… But. It’s, it’s a birth! Back in Derry, their Social Studies teacher, a match for It in gleeful sadism, had shown his charges multiple close-ups of a woman in labour. Something something anthropology. Bev had had to be excused.

I’d carry them for you myself, he says on the spur of memory, if I could.

She laughs, she trails her mouth across his, she laughs again, he’ll spend every day of the rest of their lives stoking that laugh’s embers. I know, she says, and nestles against his midriff once again, whistling for Homie to tap his paw to the light switch. Go to sleep, dear heart.

* * *

When Mike picks up the bleat, he’s trekking near Spring Lake, Hernando County.

Not according to plan. Back when he was juggling two jobs and a slate of neuroses nowhere near the Freud-approved quota, the beach was the limit. Far, far away horizons. Mike kept a 1978 Lonely Planet towards his breaks from being the Man Who Whispered to Patrons (and strong-armed the board of trustees into subscribing to _Cosmo_ , _Architectural Digest_ , _Rue Morgue Magazine_ , _The Richie Tozier Fanzine_.)

What the hippie trail promised, the Sunshine State delivers. Enter: a beach, a trout tour, a ‘smores bar, a beach, a first prize at a Sand Castle Contest, a nonprofit Hawaian shorts contest with Bill and Ben, a contrite emoji to Bev _re_ the aforementioned, birds of various pinks, a cathartic air balloon tour, a beach. 

Fifteen years of unused annual leave rears fund a good long hour in the sun. But after a week, Mike & Car shake the sand off their respective feet and tires, and drive off.

He looked up the demographics. Less than 1% Black families - hi again, deja vu, old friend. But he will _not_ conflate Derry with his vision field, not when the first wet prairie in North Florida rings a homier bell. The air less of a tang when he shared it with Leroy, the light less cloud-coloured. But the grass under his boots gives as it gave then, same benign crunch. Mike closes his eyes; hears the beloved stern voice.

The _library_? You think I’m letting you put yourself full in Derry’s crosshairs, boy? At least stay here. Don’t let them pen you up like a -

And then, the bleat. 

Mike looks around; spots the farm a mile away, a darkish block in the falling light. The sheep cries again, faint but resolute. Another Mike pauses; listens across a thirty-year-old gap. That’s no escape artist. No fox alarm. The deja vu shifts; gathers; coated by the scents of Spring. That’s…

Before he knows, he is crossing out of the pasture into a little wood, near a creek. The bleat again, stronger, closer. He can see the ewe now, lying near the water. She looks exhausted - she’s gone up and down, the deja vu murmurs, straining herself for a birth that’s taking its own sweet time. There’s no one in view.

“Darn, girl,” Mike says. His grandpa’s words, long forgotten. So many years foregrounding Leroy with a gun, Leroy ruthless, making the sheep a sharp-edged life lesson. But Leroy had seen to the lambing season, too. Why did Mike forget? Not Leroy himself - the picture made sure of that, screwing the old man’s courage to the sticking place. But the Leroy who knelt close to a dam in labour and stroked her flanks, saying “Darn, girl”.

Already his jacket hangs on a bough. Mike kneels in the wet sand; unbuttons and pulls his sleeves back before he ransacks his bag for bottled water and hand sanitizer. Not ideal, but it’ll have to do. Each gesture eddying back to the surface of his mind like the air bubbles at the flat of water. Here’s the lamb’s pink nose, between the fore (thank god) hooves, claiming breath and life. Nothing here that would make a half-decent lambing cord, so it’s up to his hands to do the job. 

They do, his heart rattling a pace for them because any delay can be a matter of life and death for the lamb and the sum of Mike is rooting for life. It’s just a strange creek and another man’s ewe, that Mike will never see again, only it’s so much more - it’s a bunch of dead kids Mike couldn’t save, it’s Leroy’s tired eyes on his hospital bed, the ultimate plea for him to get out, it’s Eddie’s mouth, bloody but smiling, Mike’s own mouth saying _Stan the Man_ , it’s a yellow rainslicker enveloped in sobs, and Mike’s hands, slippery but rapt, intent on pulling a life into the open.

There’s another voice in his back, strong with the Southern flavour. _1% Black_ resurfaces faintly, but Mike will see the job through. The ewe’s bleat rises one last time, a delivery of relief, before she sags back to one side. Another pair of hands joins Mike’s in lifting the new lamb between their arms, turning it over to check it - the voice babbling in gratitude - while the pink nose suckles its first breath.

 _I made it_ , Mike confides to the creek and the garrulous night. And if one more voice answers, that’s strictly between his joy and him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


This, for Richie, is win numero uno: his utter failure at being a Truman Capote character and end up at the bottom of a bottle of seconal. 

Not that much of a win. Richie’s faith is wobbly at best, making it hard to fancy a celestial Eddie (little wings strapped on each side of his fanny pack?) greeting him tearfully at the Golden Gates. Yeah, right. More like losing his shit nineteen to the dozen about barbiturates. Also, don’t they reroute your flight if you off yours truly? Would he end up with Stan? And spend his seconal-sponsored eternity enduring his best friend’s granny tones while Stan tears into him with _Did you even read my letter_?

Screw eternity. It’s not like Pennywise did a sterling job of selling it in the first place.

Instead Richie takes the best revenge. On his and Eddie’s behalf. It’s one thing, Richie living on, even if it’s what Eddie ensured with his dying breath (that Richie prays from the heart - dumb, incredulous, pumping heart - came before he left Eddie in the thick of battling). Eddie should live on here, whether he and Richie end up feeding the topsoil or sharing Your Mom jokes in the top ether. (The Almighty will understand. Theologically speaking, if the Bible is to be trusted, He is His own Mom joke.)

Thus, Richie fires his writer with a golden handshake. Next comes his manager, with Richie explaining that he needs a break from the frat boy repartees and will henceforth sing _his_ tune for his supper. Better him firing Steve now than Steve showing him the door after Richie lets out his dirty little secret.

Steve looks at him in pained disbelief. Says, Dude, this is 2016 L.A., are you shitting me? What did you expect - tar and feathers? I’m calling Ellen this minute, and you’d better be good.

He cries all over Ellen DeGeneres. Then makes it up to her with a meme that will go beserk, launching a thousand gifs and two million likes before Richie knows it. In weeks to come, minority icons, frustrated wives and mothers, bullied kids, aspiring comedians, and at least one presidential candidate will stand up to their antagonists and yell _I BBQ MY INHALER_. Richie soon learns that he’s made Eddie’s soul immortal. At least for the time being.

So that’s one box ticked off.

But… Eddie had a body too. Eddie _was_ a body - was 5 feet 9 of vulnerable, button-nosed, then long-nosed, chattering, brown-eyed loveliness. And that loveliness now lies all alone under a leper-house’s dust. In a pariah corner. Cosmically polluted for aeons. And nobody knows. It wakes Richie up in the night, that pang, that knowing - until he mutters “Fuck It” under his toothbrush and Googles up Derry’s land brokers.

Absolutely not, says Richie’s banker.

Okay, so Richie works smaller, spaced-out gigs these days. But he’s a meme mogul. Right? If that’s not collateral, then what is?

His banker sighs, pinches the fold of skin between his eyes, and asks if Mr Tozier is aware that he’s investing in a hole in every regard. 

Took me twenty years, man, says Richie.

Or that Mr Tozier, who only last year purchased a house on the Marina del Rey and paid for it upfront, is currently a little strapped for cash.

Really?

Really. Not that Mr Tozier has anything to worry about - yet. But he would be well advised, given his current liquid assets, to stick to _one_ estate property. In his best interest.

Right-ho, says Richie, and sells the house. 

Now that he has cash a-plenty on the side, time for step 2. He wavers before calling Ben, because Richie was always and utterly selfish when it came to Eddie. But there’s the rub - Eddie was always and utterly flanked by people rabid for a monopoly on him. Richie sighs. Then makes the call.

Ben, being Ben, gears into insta-big-brother mode. Puts more wheels in motion than ye olde multidrag race. Richie is told about landscape designers, water engineers, soil healers (that’s a thing), _in situ_ artists (that’s another thing), until his head is pounding and Bev has to wrestle Ben for the phone. Bill jumps in with both feet, offering copyrights, royalties, _anything, m-man_. Mike, for the most part, listens. But when Richie starts flipping out about Junkieland 2.0 and the odds of their memory garden ending up a landfill, Mike says calmly, “No, that’s taken care of”, and Richie doesn’t ask.

It’s another six months before he gets the green thumbs up. By now, the pang is a humbler hum. Grief no longer Fear’s evil twin, same fluttering, restless, making Richie swallow at the oddest times. When this Loser calls, or that Loser, because they’re a bunch of stickers worse than a nicotine patch, bless them, he can truthfully say that he’s good. Got a number of proposals under his belt, some very nice, not all about the gigs, and maybe… but not yet. ("Trashmonk? Oh, fucking hysterical, Bill.")

“Your turn to lead,” Mike texts. So Richie texts back a day and hour and then drives in two hours ahead because he’s still a selfish asshole. He gives Derry a wide berth, quiet as it has been, taking a loop and a cross-country road to Neibolt Street.

The memory garden…

The memory garden is splendour in the grass.

What stalked his grief as a balding, yellowing dead-end now stretches a beautiful distance of long grass, blue violets, Queen Anne’s lace, and a flower called Heal All that Richie had no idea existed but is apparently one of Maine’s pride-and-joys. The flowers breathe up his ankles as he follows the stone path to the little bench at the centre. No trash. No trampling, as far as the eye can see. Whatever spell Mike dug up assuredly did the trick, Richie thinks, sitting, then lying down on the bench so he can stare up at the situ-thing.

The artist was a weathered dame of sixty who knew a chief mourner when she saw one. Skipped the small talk. Said, Give me his high watermarks, taking a sheet of paper and jotting lines and circles as he spoke, until it was there - _the_ Artefact. Small, because Eddie was a fucking shortstack, but beautiful. There’s wood, rot-proof, and a lance that shoots high in the sky and blooms into a leaf-shape at its end. Rocks, Barren-grey but clean, but strong - piled on one another like a fight won, or maybe a cairn, if they put a single bicycle wheel at the top of cairns in this day and age.

The wheel is a mere ring of steel, but as Richie steps nearer it gives a tentative spin, then another, then starts running excited circles. Peak of July, every other field comatose in the heat, but here’s the wheel going crazy. _Look at him go_ , Richie thinks, and the pang lullabies a _Yes_ , but the wind is on the fly, targeting Richie and teasing at his glasses. The wind is unconfined; blows where it will - a manic cyclist - a paddle ball freed from its elastic leash; and right now, it’s patting Richie’s cheek and the wet on it. 

The flowers sway with the wind and Richie takes off his glasses so that he can turn his face up to it, eyes closed, waiting for his friends.


End file.
